Freitag ab eins macht jeder seins

...which means "after 1pm on Friday, everyone's free to do his or her own thing." It's much snappier in German, I promise. My boss sent me home early today! Good boss. Nice boss. Happy Jess.

It was quite a week. Like me, the week was a random juxtaposition of incredibly concentrated live the moment! intensity and fairly laid-back, go-with-the-flow-iness. The intense part was work... I am coordinating a group of college students doing a May Term here, and while they are extremely nice, it's a complicated program involving lots of details that must constantly be juggled by yours truly. And there's lots of hands-on work for me, which I'm not complaining about at all, because normally I dig that stuff. But I think it got to be a bit much this week. The translating, especially.

Now, I am proud of myself that I have advanced far enough in my knowledge of German that I can do this effectively (and I fully acknowledge that it was a frustrating, uphill battle). But it's still difficult and exhausting and draining. You basically have to take all of your own problems and issues and preferences and ponderings and personality and lock them into a little corner in the back of your mind, so they don't seep out and ruin the flow of someone else's words through your mind and tongue. Like a hot metal spoon in a bowl of boiling soup, you are nothing but a good conductor. Translating a lecture takes more prolonged concentration than I generally imagine myself to be capable of. But I have this emergency mode that says, Jess, nobody else will do this if you don't. Go! And that mode sees me at my most productive. Like a surgeon, kinda, but with a comparatively inconsequential subject.

So I switch on my emergency mode and sit in my chair and gaze expectantly at the expert du jour. Let the occupation begin. My brain is not my own for the next two hours. I feel almost possessed by her words, and the only way to exorcise them is by letting them transform themselves in to the appropriate English expressions and proceed in due fashion out my mouth.

The downside to being a translator is the splitting headache I get soon afterwards, as my brain reasserts its ownership of my thoughts, lifting its furry leg against the trees and fire hydrants of my cerebral cortex, punishing me for harboring the fugitive. (As soon as I feel better, we'll be having words, my brain and I). It's the lingering residue of this headache that is telling me I overdid it. A work hangover, that's what I've got. I have decided to dope it up and ignore it. We'll see.

The upside is that you get to be an instantaneous expert, no prep work required. This week, I was a grade school principal, a social worker lecturing on domestic violence, and a Berthold Brecht scholar. That's kind of cool.

But in the midst of the mind-bending stuff, my gimp ankle was telling me to take it easy. So I amused myself in non-athletic ways this week, watching a whole lot of Sex and the City, obsessing over your blogs and indulging in other forms of electronic communications. (Hooray, one more time, for my pretty darn fast Internet connection.) My rollerblades have been mocking me from their perch on the shelf at the end of the hall, but I will get to them in due time. I still have about three more seasons left. :-)